SCOTUS rescues Texas gerrymander, says lower court erred by rejecting the map on “eve” of election.
Editors’ Blog
Rep. Elise Stefanik, last seen lighting her political career on fire in a run for New York governor, has declared war on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). Why exactly I’m not entirely sure, other than she simply doesn’t like him. It sparked this deliciously petty but not inapt reply from what appears to have been one of Johnson’s top deputies.
Mr. Johnson declined to comment, as well. But a senior Republican congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of prolonging an intraparty feud, said that after Mr. Johnson had provided Ms. Stefanik with office space and a budget for what the aide described as “a fake job and a fake title,” he would have expected her to be more gracious.
Kate and Josh talk the Tennessee special election, a new Dem running for Chuy Garcia’s gifted seat and the Nuzzi-Lizza-RFK trainwreck.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Grifters, Ring-Kissers and Supporting Hatchet Men: It’s Time To Vote for 2025’s Golden Dukes
Trump II is so repulsive we had to make new categories!
To all of you readers who submitted noxious nominations for the 17th annual Golden Duke awards, we thank you for your service. It’s not easy to sift back through the grime that’s caked atop the first year of President Trump’s second term to elevate and celebrate the scandals and the creeps who remind us of the real reason for the season (honoring depravity).
We seem to be in another Epstein hiatus before the story and obsession again explodes into the center of the political news ecosystem. Presumably the next episode will come when the White House releases the heavily redacted and/or cooked version of the “Epstein files” that Congress ordered the administration to release. But I wanted to note this very weird oddity right smack in the center of the story that continues to be almost entirely ignored. I was reminded of it last night by this story in The Bulwark by Mona Charen. I first heard about in those interviews Sid Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz did with Michael Wolff about Jeff Epstein, which I wrote about back in September. Wolff discussed something that I had never heard before: that Steve Bannon, basically right up to the time Epstein died, was working with him on a combo rebrand/crisis comms effort to rehabilitate Epstein’s reputation. Yes! Bannon was working as Epstein’s image rehab specialist. The man at the center of all the anti-“elite”, anti-“globalist” pedophiles was tight with Epstein and trying to help him come in from the sex offender cold. He’d actually done hours of video interviews with Epstein as prep for either a 60 Minutes or 60 Minutes-style interview to revive his reputation.
Recently, Tom Nichols — the dissident or lapsed conservative who is a key Never Trump figure — wrote a Bluesky thread on the importance of federalism. He focused on the longstanding Democratic demand (albeit a futile one) that the president be elected by a national popular vote. I’ve made the same argument, though I’ve never treated it as a big focus since abolishing the Electoral College is all but impossible. You’re never going to get small states to disempower themselves by agreeing to such a constitutional amendment. But Nichols made the argument that some form of the Electoral College is an essential component of American federalism and that federalism is one sheet anchor of our liberties, as we’re finding out today.
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Supreme Court Just Okayed One Neat Trick to Illegally Gerrymander Your State
The Court just wrote a roadmap for illegal gerrymanders: Just wait to pass them until the “eve” of the election, and no one can stop you.
The Supreme Court was simply hamstrung, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, unable to knock down Texas’ hyper-partisan, likely racial gerrymander because the election it would govern is so close.
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Grifters, Ring-Kissers and Supporting Hatchet Men: It’s Time To Vote for 2025’s Golden Dukes
Trump II is so repulsive we had to make new categories!
Kate and Josh talk the Tennessee special election, a new Dem running for Chuy Garcia’s gifted seat and the Nuzzi-Lizza-RFK trainwreck.
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